Relative truth and the first person

Transcription

1 Philos Stud (2010) 150: DOI /s Relative truth and the first person Friederike Moltmann Published online: 15 April 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V Abstract In recent work on context-dependency, it has been argued that certain types of sentences give rise to a notion of relative truth. In particular, sentences containing predicates of personal taste and moral or aesthetic evaluation as well as epistemic modals are held to express a proposition (relative to a context of use) which is true or false not only relative to a world of evaluation, but other parameters as well, such as standards of taste or knowledge or an agent. I will argue that the sentences that apparently give rise to relative truth should be understood by relating them in a certain way to the first person. More precisely, such sentences express what I will call first-person-based genericity, a form of generalization that is based on an essential first-person application of the predicate. The account differs from standard relative truth account in crucial respects: it is not the truth of the proposition expressed that is relative to the first person; the proposition expressed by a sentence with a predicate of taste rather has absolute truth conditions. Instead it is the propositional content itself that requires a first-personal cognitive access whenever it is entertained. This account, I will argue, avoids a range of problems that standard relative truth theories of the sentences in question face and explains a number of further peculiarities that such sentences display. Keywords Relative truth First person De se Predicates of taste Genericity Propositional attitudes In recent work on context-dependency, it has been argued that certain types of sentences give rise to a notion of relative truth. In particular, sentences containing predicates of personal taste and moral or aesthetic evaluation as well as epistemic F. Moltmann (&) Directrice de recherche, Institut d Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, et des Techniques (IHPST), 13 rue du Four, Paris, France

2 188 F. Moltmann modals are held to express a proposition (relative to a context of use) which is true or false not only relative to a world of evaluation, but other parameters as well, such as standards of taste or knowledge or an agent. Thus, a sentence like chocolate tastes good would express a proposition p that is true or false not only at a world of evaluation, but relative to the additional parameter as well, such as a parameter of taste or an agent. I will argue that the sentences that apparently give rise to relative truth should be understood by relating them in a certain way to the first person. More precisely, such sentences express what I will call first-person-based genericity, a form of generalization by which the speaker quantifies over every one x in the relevant domain as someone he identifies with, allowing the predicate to apply to x as if it applied to the speaker himself. This account differs from standard relative truth theories in crucial respects: it is not the truth of the proposition expressed that is relative to the first person; the proposition expressed by a sentence with a predicate of taste rather has absolute truth conditions. Instead it is the propositional content itself that requires a first-personal cognitive access whenever it is entertained. Thus, if two agents disagree about a sentence like chocolate tastes good without either being at fault, this is disagreement about a sentence that has absolute truth conditions and thus is either true or false. But the content of the sentence can be grasped (and thus entertained and evaluated) only in an essential first-personal way, namely by applying the predicate to everyone in the domain as if to oneself (and thus allowing two agents to have different first- personal grounds for applying the predicate). On the proposed account, it is conditions on grasping the content, rather than truth conditions what is peculiar to sentence giving rise to intuitions of relative truth. This account, I will argue, avoids a range of problems that standard relative truth theories face and explains a number of further peculiarities that such sentences display. The account goes along with an independently motivated view on which truth conditions of sentences are not given by mind-independent propositional contents, but rather by mind-dependent attitudinal objects (as I will call them), or kinds of such objects, that is, objects of the sort John s belief that S or the belief that S. First-person-based genericity is expressed explicitly in English by sentences that contain the generic pronoun one as in (1a) or its empty counterpart, so-called arbitrary PRO (as generative syntacticians call it), as in (1b): (1) a. One can see the picture from the entrance. b. It is possible PRO arb to see the picture from the entrance. Sentences (1a) and (1b) have a natural reading on which they express a generalization on the basis of the speaker s own, perhaps unique, experience or action. That is, (1a, b) are naturally used as an expression of the speaker s own ability to see the picture from the entrance and at the same time express a generalization: for every normal x, x can see the picture from the entrance. The key observation is that the same intuitions of relative truth that are displayed by sentences with evaluative predicates or epistemic modals arise with sentences such as (1a) and (1b). In previous work I have developed an account of generic one

3 Relative truth and the first person 189 on which generic one expresses (contextually restricted) quantification over individuals insofar as the relevant agent identifies with them. In this paper, I will argue that this analysis can and should be carried over to sentences with predicates of personal taste, as well as possibly other sentences containing predicates of aesthetic and moral evaluation or epistemic modals. I take first-person-based genericity to be the source of faultless disagreement in general, for any expressions with which it may arise. However, not all types of sentences for which a relativist treatment has been proposed are to be analysed in terms of first-person-based genericity. Expressions that involve first-person-based genericity need to be distinguished from expressions that are to be treated in just the same way as de se interpreted pronouns (such adjectives like left or local). The latter do not give rise to faultless disagreement and do not involve first-person-based genericity. I will start by presenting two core intuitions that motivate a relativist account, and point out further crucial features of the relevant linguistic expressions. I then give a general account of de se-interpreted pronouns and related expressions. After that I introduce the notion of first-person-based genericity on the basis of my previous analysis of generic one showing that generic-one sentence exhibit the intuitions of relative truth in the same way. I finally argue that the same semantic analysis can and should be carried over to other sentences displaying intuitions of relative truth. 1 The intuitions of relative truth 1.1 Faultless disagreement One main motivation for a relativist account has been the possibility of faultless disagreement (Koelbel 2002, 2003). Faultless disagreement consists in a situation in which two agents disagree about the truth of a proposition, with neither apparently being at fault. Thus, below, neither A nor B may be at fault, yet they disagree: (2) A: Frog legs taste good. B: No, I disagree, frog legs do not taste good. In fact A and B subsequently may enter into a dispute, let s say whether they should start putting frog legs on the menu of their restaurant. Faultless disagreement arises not only in a situation of conversation, but also manifests itself in intuitions about two agents being involved in different conversations (MacFarlane 2007) or about two agents beliefs (Koelbel 2003). What is crucial about faultless disagreement is that both agents seem to be right in their claims or beliefs, but yet they disagree. What is important is that to be right, or not to be at fault means more than having a reason or epistemic grounds: the intuition is that both the statement and its negation are in some sense true, though as uttered by different agents. Faultless disagreement does not arise with sentences that express different propositions when uttered by different speakers. Moreover, faultless disagreement does not arise when the judge is made explicit, as in (3):

4 190 F. Moltmann (3) A: Frog legs taste good to me. B: Frog legs do not taste good to me. Related to the possibility of faultless disagreement is the observation that two agents may agree about the content of an evaluative sentence even if it is clear that the relevant parameters of evaluation of the two agents are different. Suppose John is a great wine connoisseur, with a comparative experience of various types of wine, whereas Mary has not tasted any wine before, then the parameters evaluation for the proposition that the wine tastes good will certainly be different for John and Mary, yet they may agree that the proposition is true: (4) John and Mary agreed that the wine tastes good (but for very different reasons). This intuition is suitably called faulty agreement. Like faultless disagreement, it arises in just the same way in relation to different agents beliefs. That is, (4) would be true even if John and Mary did not talk to each other, but just believe, for different reasons, that the wine tastes good. For sentences with predicates of taste, the object of disagreement or agreement is a propositional content that is truth-conditionally incomplete in that it does not involve the relevant judge. Or so the data have been interpreted by relativist theories. There is another property that has been related to relative truth, namely retraction: the possibility of withdrawing a propositional content once correctly held in the past. I will put this property aside for the main part of the paper and turn to it only briefly at the end. 1.2 Sharing By sharing I mean the possibility of sharing of propositional contents by agents involved in different contexts of evaluation. Sharing is a property not generally considered in the recent literature on relative truth, and thus the data in this section are new. Sharing has been already discussed at length, though, in regard to moral predicates by Schiffer (1990). If a sentences S involves relative truth, then sharing of propositional contents consists in the intuition that agents, even if they are clearly involved in different contexts of evaluation, share the same propositional content when they have a propositional attitude that S. There are various linguistic manifestations of sharing. One of them is the possibility of sentences with a conjunctive or plural subject and a single clausal complement of an attitude verb 1 : (5) John and Mary/These two people believe that the wine tastes good. 1 The use of believe in (5a) suggests that the agent does not himself have the experience. To get the nonsubjective first-person-based reading, know would be the right verb: (1) John knows that white chocolate tastes good. But then faultless disagreement is actually hard to get, see Sect. 5.

5 Relative truth and the first person 191 (5) requires a single interpretation of the clausal complement, which can thus not involve two different taste parameters or agents. Another linguistic manifestation of sharing is the validity of the inference in (6), assuming that A s and B s criteria for evaluating wine are known to be quite different (A, but not B, lets say, being a connoisseur): (6) A believes the wine tastes good. B believes the wine tastes good. A and B believe the same thing. Such an inference holds with any propositional attitude or speech act verb. Evaluative predicates, in licensing the inference, thus differ from other contextdependent expressions such as demonstratives, with which the inference is not valid: (7) John believes that Mary is there (in New York). Bill believes that Mary is there (in Boston) John and Bill believe the same thing. The validity of the inference in (7) does not hinge on some looseness of uses of the expression the same thing. With a conclusion containing a free relative as in (8) the same sort of inference is validated, assuming again that John s and Mary s taste parameters are rather different: (8) John believes what Mary believes, namely that the wine tastes good. Even more importantly, the same sort of inference is valid with a conclusion containing the corresponding nominalization of the verb, such as the same belief or the same claim: (9) a. John believes that the wine tastes good Mary believes that the wine tastes good. John and Mary have the same belief (share a belief). b. John claimed that the wine tastes good Mary claimed that the wine tastes good. John and Mary made the same claim. These inferences are valid even if John s and Mary s taste parameters are different (and even are known to be different). Such linguistic criteria for sharing are not the only criteria for establishing shared meaning when different contexts of assessment are involved. There are also a range of other intuitions that indicate that the meaning, that is, conceptual role of evaluative predicates when used by different agents is the same even if the agents criteria for applying the predicates are rather different. This point has been made rather thoroughly, in the context of a discussion of moral predicates, by Schiffer (1990). Schiffer discusses various intuitions that show that moral predicates have the same meaning for two agents even if the agents differ in their moral criteria and principles for applying the predicates. For example, even if two agents have different moral principles, their concepts of good and wrong are the same given the roles of those concepts in determining how the agents want the world to be, given the kinds of emotional responses they trigger, given the relation of those concepts to

6 192 F. Moltmann related ones (ought, just), given that the concepts involve the same process of moral training (of punishment and reward), and given the predicates common point, in getting people to behave in a certain way. Needless to say, similar criteria for the individuation of conceptual roles can be found for other evaluative predicates as well. The crucial point that faultless disagreement and sharing appear to establish is that the propositional content of sentences with predicates of personal taste is the same even when the context-dependent criteria of evaluation involved (such as standards of taste etc.) are clearly distinct. 1.3 Other kinds of expressions exhibiting the intuitions of relative truth Epistemic modals are another often discussed class of expressions displaying the intuitions of relative truth (Egan et al. 2005; Egan 2007; MacFarlane 2008). They clearly display faultless disagreement: one person may believe or claim that John may be in Paris, while another person with more knowledge disagrees, with neither being at fault. Epistemic modals also lead to sharing of content, as shown by the validity of the following inference: (10) Mary believes that it may rain (because she heard the weather forecast). John believes that it may rain (because he noticed the cloud formation). John and Mary believe the same thing (but for different reasons). The inference is also valid with the conclusion in (11a) or, as faulty agreement, with the conclusion in (11b): (11) a. John and Mary have the same belief. b. John and Mary agree that it may rain. There are other context-dependent expressions which give rise to sharing, but not faultless disagreement (or faulty agreement). These are certain temporal and spatial expressions such as right, left, local or neighboring. 2 Thus, from (12a) (which itself involves sharing already), one can infer both (12b) and (12b 0 ) even if what counts left for Mary is right for John: (12) a. John and Mary both believe that the tree is to the left. b. John and Mary believe the same thing. b 0. John and Mary share the same belief. 2 It appears that also certain presupposition triggers allow for sharing, for example expressions like another time, a second time, or again: (1) John believes that he won in Mary believes that she won in John and Mary hope to win another time/a second time/again. (2) a. John and Mary hope for the same thing. b. John and Mary have the same hope. Such presuppositional expressions are generally held to be anaphoric to some element in a preceding textual or mental representation. But obviously, the identity of the antecedent element does not bear on the identity of the content. The present paper will not try to offer an account of the phenomenon.

7 Relative truth and the first person 193 In that situation, however (that is, if what counts left for Mary is right for John), it would not be the case that John and Mary agree. Rather, they clearly disagree. Thus, left does not give rise to faulty agreement. Relational adjectives like left or neighbouring in fact pattern like pronouns interpreted de se, and as such they need to be sharply distinguished from predicates of taste and other expressions of the kind. De se interpreted pronouns exhibit sharing, as seen from the validity of the inference in (13a), with the two occurrences of he being interpreted de se, as well as the same inference with (13b) as conclusion: (13) a. John thinks that he is the winner. Bill thinks he is the winner. John and Bill think the same thing. b. John and Bill share the same thought. I will distinguish expressions giving rise to faultless disagreement as well as sharing as type 1 expressions from those that give rise only to sharing, which I will call type 2 expressions 3. Later we will see that two further features distinguish the two kinds of expressions: type 1 expression exhibit what I will call obligatory and a quasi-firstperson-orientedness, whereas type 2 expressions exhibit optional sharing and no quasi-first-person orientedness. We can thus summarize the features of the two kinds of expressions as follows: (14) type 1 expressions (predicates of taste, epistemic modals, predicates of aesthetic evaluation, generic one): faultless disagreement, (obligatory) sharing, quasi-first-person orientedness. type 2 expressions (de se interpreted pronouns, relational adjectives (right, left, local, neighbouring): (optional) sharing, no faultless disagreement, no quasi-first-personorientedness. 2 Standard relativist theories and their problems The relativist account takes the content of sentences giving rise to relative truth intuitions to be truth-conditionally incomplete. In order to account for faultless disagreement in particular, it relativizes the truth value of such a content to the context of the assessor, in particular the assessor himself or other parameters that belong to the context of the assessor (such as a parameter of taste). Truth then is relative in the following sense: 3 Egan (2007) discusses the same distinction with a sentence like my pants are on fire and sentences with epistemic modals. He argues that my pants are on fire cannot be asserted when expressing a self-locating proposition and gives a pragmatic account of why this is so. It is fairly clear, however, that the distinction is not a pragmatic one but resides strictly in the formal distinction between type 1 and type 2 expressions (expressions like pronouns interpreted de se as opposed to expressions giving rise to relative truth).

8 194 F. Moltmann (15) Relative Truth The truth of a sentence S is relative iff for an utterance context u, the proposition that S expresses in u is true or false only relative to a context c that contains not only a world (and time) but other elements as well. Here c is simply the context to which the truth value of the sentence is relativized (also often called an index, to distinguish it from the utterance context). McFarlane distinguishes between the context of evaluation, the context that can be shifted by modal operators, and a context of assessment, which is the context of the person evaluating the sentence as true or false, and which thus would correspond to the context c in (15). Other authors do not make the distinction between context of evaluation and context of assessment, but take sentences with predicates of taste to have a truth value relative to a context of evaluation containing also a judge (thus extending the index ) (Lasersohn 2005). For the discussion to follow, the difference will not be crucial. There are different views as to what the context may contain to which the truth of the sentence is to be relativized. On one view, the context may contain whatever parameters seem necessary for the evaluation of the expression in question, such as parameters of taste or epistemic standards (MacFarlane 2005a, b). On another view, it will just contain, besides a world (and perhaps time) of evaluation, the relevant agent, or equivalently, a centered world (a pair consisting of a world and an agent) (Egan et al. 2005; Lasersohn 2005). It appears that a relativist account, especially on the first version, is problematic in several respects. 2.1 Explaining disagreement The most important problem for the relativist account is that it does not really explain faultless disagreement. Competent speakers will know if the truth value of a sentence they utter is to be evaluated relative to a particular kind of context of assessment. They will know that they mean the utterance of such a sentence to be true relative to their own context. The problem then is, why on the relativist account can there be disagreement among two speakers when the speakers know that the content of their utterances can be both true, though relative to different contexts? If the truth conditions of the sentence are clearly different relative to the two speakers, then this should correspond to a difference in subject matter, rather than to a single content about which there could be disagreement. Also, not every version of the relativist account seems to be able to explain the difference between frog legs taste good to me on the one hand and frog legs taste good on the other hand. On one proposal (Lasersohn 2005), the context of evaluation depends in fact on the speaker s own choice, his taking a particular perspective for evaluating the proposition. If the context of assessment depends on an agent s choosing a perspective of evaluation, then one would think that this choice of a perspective is part of an overall contextually completed intended meaning of the utterance. But then such a contextually completed meaning would not be relevantly different from the meaning of frog legs taste good to me (or frog

9 Relative truth and the first person 195 legs taste good to d, where d is the relevant judge). But we have seen that the latter does not give rise to faultless disagreement, whereas the former does. 4 Another problem for the account concerns the parameters themselves that are used for the relativization of truth. Those parameters, be they agents or evaluative or epistemic standards, are individuated externally and should thus be equally accessible and identifiable for all the interlocutors, given the circumstances of the utterance situation or propositional attitude. Given the standard view about assertion and belief as aiming for truth, why shouldn t a truth-conditionally complete content including the relevant parameters be identified in a given context by each one of the interlocutors and understood as the content to be communicated? That is, why should agreement or disagreement not pertain to such a truth-conditionally completed content as it would serve the aim of assertion or belief, rather than the truth-conditionally incomplete content expressed by a sentence relative to a context of utterance? 5,6 The relativist account is also difficult to maintain for the content of a sentence like frog legs taste good when it acts as the object of belief. There are two options of how to construe the object of belief in this case. First, the object of belief could be viewed as a pair consisting of a proposition and a context of evaluation (Lasersohn 2005). But this does not seem to do justice to the intuition that two people, one of whom believes that frog legs taste good and the other of whom believes that frog legs do not taste good, disagree rather than having different but compatible overall beliefs. Alternatively, the content of belief could be taken to be a truth-relative proposition with the judge being identified with whoever is the believer (Egan et al. 2005). But again this makes it difficult to account for how disagreement could arise. To summarize, the relativist account straightforwardly explains sharing. But it does not provide a real explanation of why the relevant examples give rise to disagreement. 2.2 The meaning-intention problem The first version of the relativist account posits parameters, such as parameters of taste, as part of the context of assessment. The problem with such entities is the same as in a number of cases in which entities of a certain sort are posited as implicit arguments, namely what Schiffer (1987) has discussed as the meaningintention problem. A speaker generally would not be able to identify entities such as parameters of taste as part of a context relative to which he intends his utterance to 4 On MacFarlane s (2005a, b) account, the context of assessment is uniquely determined by whoever assesses the truth value of the proposition. This obviously would not predict an identity of the intended meaning of white chocolate tastes good and white chocolate tastes good to d (for d being the relevant judge). 5 Stephenson (2007) attributes the disagreement in faultless disagreement to the aim of (some) assertions to establish a sort of single shared judge as part of the common ground in the context of conversation. The problem of such a discourse-related explanation of faultless disagreement is that it could not be carried over to faultless disagreement that arises with beliefs. 6 MacFarlane (2003) actually takes the intuitions of relative truth to require a modification of the notion of assertion, truth not being the aim of assertion anymore.

10 196 F. Moltmann be made. A speaker may be entirely justified in uttering a sentence like this tastes good without in any way being able to identify a taste parameter as part of his intentions. This problem of cognitive accessibility of the parameters of a context of assessment is a natural generalization of Schiffer s meaning-intention problem. 2.3 The de se status of the parameters of assessment Relativist accounts allow for readings involving error through misidentification that in fact do not exist. Suppose that Joe reads a description of someone that he fails to realize is a description of himself and that misdescribes him as someone that likes frog legs when Joe in fact does not. In this case, given a relativist account, Joe believes that frog legs taste good would be true (though Joe s belief would not). An agent d could not believe p to be true relative to a taste parameter that d does not believe to be his own, that is, d could not believe p to be true relative to d without recognizing that d is himself. In other words, an agent must identify himself as the judge when standing in an attitudinal relation to an evaluative propositional content. The problem for the relativist account is that it assigns to the additional parameter of assessment a status of a value of a pronoun interpreted de re, when in fact the parameter should have the status of the semantic value of a pronoun interpreted de se Predictions about attitude contexts The standard relativist account faces potential problems for attitude reports. McFarlane (2005b) assumes that the additional parameter of assessment of the embedded proposition always becomes the parameter of the assessment of the entire sentence. This is adequate, however, only for non-attitudinal embedding predicates, such as modal and temporal ones, as in (16): (16) It could be the case that frog legs taste good. In (16), the taste parameter is clearly that of the speaker. This is different with attitude reports: (17) a. John thinks that frog legs taste good. b. John thinks that it might rain. Clearly the standard of taste in (17a) and the epistemic state in (17b) are those of John, not the speaker. In general, with embedding attitude verbs, the additional parameter will be the one of the described agent. This is not a problem for a relativist account as such, however. As Egan et al. (2005) make clear, for a truthrelative proposition p, an attitude report d believes that S can be made to be understood as: d believes S to be true relative to d. 8 7 For observations and a proposal concerning de se status in the case of epistemic modals see Stephenson (2007), fn See Stephenson (2007) for an equivalent account.

11 Relative truth and the first person 197 Lasersohn s (2005) account also gets attitude reports right. Lasersohn takes attitude verbs to express three-place relations between an agent, a sentence content, and a context. The context is the perspective the agent adopts when taking the attitude toward the sentence content and in general it is the context of the agent. But it need not be: the agent may take a different stance, which is the quasi-first-person orientation which I will turn to next. 2.5 The quasi-first-person orientation There is another important feature of evaluative predicates and epistemic modals which is that their first-person-orientation in independent contexts need not be strict, but may relate to another agent with whom the speaker only identifies. For example, a mother may persuade a child to eat by uttering (18), without thereby expressing her own taste judgment: (18) Apple sauce tastes good. The same point can be made with because-clauses and questions 9 : (19) a. John took another spoonful because it tasted so good. b. Does this taste good? Here the speaker may just identify with (or project himself onto) John (in 19a) or the addressee (in 19b), without being interested in his own taste judgments at all. Also, with epistemic modals the first-person orientation may involve an identification with another agent. Thus Egan et al. (2005) note that (20) could be uttered by a speaker who knows better but identifies himself with a person trying to find a way out of a maze: (20) The exit may be this way. Let me call the first-person-orientation when the speaker in fact identifies with another agent quasi-first-person-orientation. A quasi-first-person-orientation is not available with ordinary first-personal pronouns except in certain contexts, such as contexts of imagination, as in (21) (Williams 1973): (21) I imagine that I am Napoleon. In (21) the content of the imagination does not involve an identification of the speaker s actual person with Napoleon, but rather the speaker simply projects himself onto Napoleon. Apart from attitudes such as imagination and desire, de se interpreted pronouns and other type 2 expressions do not allow for a quasi-first person orientation. The analyses of type 1 and type 2 expressions that I will give later will account for this difference. 9 For the examples of because-clauses see Egan et al. (2005); for the example with questions see Lasersohn (2005). Of course for those authors the examples support somewhat different accounts.

12 198 F. Moltmann 2.6 Explaining the kind of context dependency involved A final problem for the standard relativist account is that it does not explain why the phenomena in question give rise to a relativization of truth rather than contextdependency in the traditional sense. The approach makes it look like an accidental fact that evaluative predicates and epistemic modals give rise to an enrichment of the context of assessment, rather than the context of use, unlike, for example, spatial demonstratives like there. The account I will propose will explain this difference: relative truth intuitions arise only with expressions that involve an essential firstperson orientation, such as evaluative predicates and epistemic modals; they cannot arise with expressions that lack the relevant kind of first-person orientation, such as spatial demonstratives. The objection just raised does not obtain for all relativist accounts, though, namely not for those that include only the relevant agent in the context of assessment (Egan et al. 2005; Lasersohn 2005). 3 Standard de se and type 2 expressions I will now sketch an account of attitudes de se which is close to that of Lewis, but will in addition involve the notion of an attitudinal object, which is needed to account for the truth conditions of sentences with de se interpreted pronouns, for conditions on sharing, and for certain differences among type 1 and type 2. We have seen that like sentences giving rise to intuitions of relative truth, sentences with de se interpreted pronouns and other type 2 expressions exhibit sharing. However, there is one difference. While the inference in (22a) is clearly valid, the same inference with (22b) or (22c) as conclusion is valid too: (22) a. John thinks that he is the winner. Bill thinks he is the winner. John and Bill think the same thing. b. John and Bill think different things. c. John and Bill have different thoughts. The latter kind of inference is not valid with type 1 expressions: (23) John thinks that frog legs taste good. Bill thinks that frog legs taste good. John and Bill think different things (have different thoughts). I will call the property of type 2 expressions of allowing both kinds of inferences optional sharing. Let us then look at a simple description of a propositional attitude de se: (24) John expects PRO to win. It is generally agreed that for propositional attitudes de se, neither a mode of presentation or nor in fact the agent s actual self needs to be part of the propositional

13 Relative truth and the first person 199 content expressed; requirements that are captured by of Lewis (1979) account of attitudes de se as self-ascriptions of properties, as in the analysis of (24) in (25): (25) expect(john, kx[win(x)]) This account predicts sharing if it is the property arguments that are taken to be the objects shared, but it does not account for the optionality of sharing. Lewis account must moreover be supplemented by a specification of the truth conditions of propositional contents of attitudes de se. Properties as contents of attitudes are truth-conditionally incomplete. But there are clear intuitions that the content of an attitude de se has its own truth conditions. If John believes that he is the winner, then what he believes is true or false. What could the truth-conditionally complete object be, the object one makes reference to with what John believes? It is what I call an attitudinal object (Moltmann 2003a, b). In the present case the attitudinal object is the object that is John s belief that he is the winner. John s belief that he is the winner is intuitively either true or false. Other attitudinal objects, such as John s expectation to win do not have truth conditions, but corresponding fulfilment conditions. Attitudinal objects arguably are the semantic values of propositional anaphora and of descriptions like what John believes (Moltmann 2003a, b). Attitudinal objects should also be considered the objects of the acceptance of assertions. Thus, Joe s assertion that he himself is a hero aims at making the addressee accept that Joe is a hero, not that he, the addressee, is a hero. That is, it aims at making the addressee accept the attitudinal object that is the speaker s assertion of PRO being the hero. 10 In this paper, I make use simply of the intuitive notion of an attitudinal object, referring the reader to other work where I have elaborated that notion and its importance in other respects. 11 If attitudinal objects are the semantic values of propositional anaphora, this accounts for the inference with (22b, c) as conclusion. But how could they account for sharing, the conclusion in (22a)? What about the first inference, that is, sharing? There is an entity, closely related to attitudinal objects, that is a suitable semantic value of the same thing in the conclusion of (22a), and that is of the sort the thought of being the winner. This entity does not include a particular agent, but can be shared by different agents. It is a kind of attitudinal object, a universal whose instances are attitudinal objects of the sort John s thought that he is the winner (cf. Moltmann 2003a, b). The availability of both attitudinal objects and kinds of attitudinal objects as semantic values of propositional pronouns and quantifiers is what explains optional sharing. Other type 2 expressions can be treated the same way. While the museum is to the left expresses a mere property, propositional pronouns and quantifiers take as 10 Stalnaker (1981) takes the behaviour of sentences with de se interpreted pronouns to be grounds for rejecting Lewis account of such sentences as expressing properties. Stalnaker instead takes them to express propositions like any other sentences. 11 In Moltmann (2003a), I argue that attitudinal objects should be considered prior to propositions and to be the primary bearers of truth values.

14 200 F. Moltmann semantic values entities of either the sort John s belief that the museum is to the left or of the sort the belief that the museum is to the left. It is now obvious why sentences with type 2 expressions do not give rise to faultless disagreement: the relevant attitudinal objects are truth conditionally complete and they can give rise to disagreement, but not to faultless disagreement. Type 1 expressions differ from type 2 expressions in that they give rise to faultless disagreement, quasi-de se orientation, and obligatory sharing. I would like to argue that these differences are due to: 1. a difference in content: sentences with type 1 expressions have a generic content. 2. a difference in conditions of grasping the propositional content. These two features are most clearly exhibited by a particular kind of type 1 expression, namely generic one, which also displays the intuitions of relative truth. I will show that the semantic analysis of generic one which I had proposed in earlier work can and should be extended to other type 1 expressions. 4 First-person-based genericity with generic one Sentences with generic one exhibit just the same intuitions of relative truth as sentences with predicates of taste. Generic one displays rather transparently what I call first-person-based genericity, and first-person-based genericity, I will argue, is the true source of intuitions of relative truth in general. What is crucial about first-person-based genericity is first that the propositional content of the sentence is generic and second that that content requires a first-person access by whoever maintains or evaluates it. The main difference between the present account and standard relative truth theories is that on the present account it is not the propositional content whose truth is relative to an agent, but rather the cognitive access to the propositional content, which requires an agent to grasp the content in a first-personal way, whatever his evaluative or epistemic background may be. 4.1 Crucial data about generic one Let me first present some basic linguistic data concerning generic one. 12 Generic one is a pronoun that always leads to generic sentences and it bears a particular connection to the first person: it leads to genericity that is either based on a first-person attribution, as in (26a), or directed towards a first-person attribution, as in (26b): (26) a. One can see the picture from the entrance. b. One is not allowed to enter. Generic one alternates with arbitrary PRO, which is its empty counterpart and thus occurs in those contexts in which an empty pronominal element, rather than an overt noun phrase is required (Moltmann 2006). Arbitrary PRO and generic one can 12 For a linguistically much more detailed discussion of what follows see Moltmann (2006).

15 Relative truth and the first person 201 covary in contexts like (27a) (that is, they will take the same semantic values under the relevant assignments), and arbitrary PRO may act as the antecedent for one, the possessive one s or the reflexive oneself, as in (27b): (27) a. PRO arb to live a great life is to realize one s true potential. b. The tailor knows what PRO arb to wear at one s own wedding. Generic one always occurs in generic sentences, and as such it can occur in apparently two distinct ways: as genericity-inducing, as in the first occurrence in (28a), and as a bound variable, as in the second occurrence in (28a): (28) a. One sometimes thinks one s life is too short. In both occurrences generic one is best taken to be an expression that introduces a variable subsequently to be bound by a generic quantifier Gn, which is formally associated with a syntactic element in sentence-initial position (Moltmann 2006): (28) b. Gn x x sometimes thinks that x s life is too short. In the linguistic literature on genericity, it is standard to use a generic quantifier Gn as in (28b) (see for example Krifka et al. 1995; Cohen 2002; Kadmon and Landman 1993; Greenberg 2007). There are a lot of controversies, though, of how to understand the generic quantifier (see the overview in Krifka et al. (1995)); in fact how to understand genericity as such (the semantics underlying the generic quantifier) is a major topic not only in linguistic semantics, but also in cognitive science and in philosophy in general. I will restrict myself to adopting just some minimal general assumptions about it. What is generally agreed is that the generic quantifier allows for exceptions and has modal force, that is, it ranges not just over actual individuals, but also over individuals in certain other possible worlds. What individuals the quantifier ranges over is generally driven by conditions of normality or stereotypicality. Such conditions generally are vague and lead to an essentially vague domain (Kadmon and Landman 1993). In addition, it is generally assumed that the generic quantifier is subject to a (much more precise) contextual restriction (Kadmon and Landman 1993). A contextual restriction is needed also for generic one. One in (29), for example, may range only over the students in a particular class: (29) One has to hand in the essay tomorrow. A plausible, if simplified way of understanding the generic quantifier, quite suited for present purposes, is to take it to be a combination of a universal quantifier ranging over possible worlds, restricted by some accessibility relation R (relating the actual worlds to the normal worlds) and a universal quantifier ranging over individuals which is both restricted by a (vague) condition of normality N and a condition C on contextually relevant individuals: (30) Vw Vx (wrw o &x[ D(w) & N(w)(x) & C(w)(x)? P(w)(x)) Generic sentences thus are heavily context-dependent: the context will provide conditions of accessibility, normality, as well as contextual relevance. At the same time, this context-dependence is subject to certain pragmatic restrictions, such as that the domain of quantification be shared by the interlocutors, and in the particular

16 202 F. Moltmann case of generic one, include the interlocutors themselves. This feature of generic sentences will also play a role for statements of taste to which the analysis will carry over (Sect. 5.1.). Of course, (30) does not yet capture any first-person-orientation of generic one. Before introducing the crucial modification, let us see how the first-personorientation manifests itself. The first-person-orientation of generic one manifests itself in what, at first sight, appears to be a general availability of an inference to the first person, as in (31): (31) One can see the picture from the entrance. I can see the picture from the entrance. However, at second sight, it turns out that this inference is not in fact generally valid. (31) can also be uttered by someone that is for some reason unable to see the picture himself, lets say someone whose view is temporarily obstructed. Thus, generic one may display in fact a quasi-first-person-orientation. The point is made particularly clearly by (32): (32) One can see me from the entrance. (32) does not display any conflict between the grammatical first person and generic one because one here obviously involves identification with people different from the speaker. Another particularly clear case of quasi-first-person-orientation is (33), which does not imply that the speaker himself has the mathematical ability to solve the equation: (33) One can solve the equation. The first-person-orientation of generic one and arbitrary PRO concerns not only the speaker, but also, in embedded contexts, whoever may be the described agent of the reported attitude or speech act: (34) a. John said that one can see the picture from the entrance. b. John said that it is nice PRO arb to walk in the park. In attitude contexts, the first-person-orientation of generic one is particularly transparent, for example when a generic-one sentence is embedded under an epistemic predicate: (35) John found out that one can see the picture from the entrance. For (35) to be true it is sufficient that John has had the experience of seeing the picture from the entrance. Generic-one sentences differ thus from universally quantified and other generic sentences, such as (36): (36) John found out that people (a normal person) can see the picture from the entrance. In (36), John has to have made sure in other ways that people other than himself can see the picture from the entrance. The first-person-orientation of generic one manifests itself also in its ability to serve in an immediate description of a first-person experience:

17 Relative truth and the first person 203 (37) I find that one can easily forget one s own past experiences. The embedded sentence in (37) naturally serves as a direct description of a firstpersonal psychological state, though the generalizing force is there as well. (37) thus differs markedly from (38), where the attitude described takes as its immediate source third-person observations, or else has a derived content, obtained only inferentially from a first-person experience: (38) I find that people (a normal person) can easily forget their (his) past experiences. Generic one (and its empty counterpart) is the most suited expression for generalizing subjective experiences as types of experiences. On the analysis I will give later, the embedded sentences in (37) and (38) do not differ in truth conditions, but rather only in an indication of epistemic grounds. This difference may lead, though, to a difference in truth conditions of an overall epistemic attitude report, such as (37) and (38). Another manifestation of the first-person-orientation of generic one are certain restrictions on which predicates generic one can accept, at least on one particular use of generic one (I will come to another use below). The predicates has a nose and lives in a big city, for example, are hardly acceptable with generic one, though they are fine in other generic sentences: (39) a.?? One has a nose. b. The typical person has a nose. (40) a.?? One lives in a big city. b. People live in a big city. Roughly the restriction on predicates acceptable with generic one is that the predicate must describe possible experiences or actions. That is, generic one requires predicates whose application to the first person, roughly, requires only selfknowledge; knowledge of one s own experiences, intentions and actions (Moltmann 2006). 13 First-person-oriented pronouns exhibit both faultless disagreement and sharing. First, faultless disagreement is possible with generic-one sentences in just the same way as with predicates of personal taste. One person might be right in asserting (41a), whereas another person, used to a greater level of comfort, may be right in his way in asserting (41b): (41) a. One can sleep on this sofa. b. One cannot sleep on this sofa. 13 There are contexts, however, in which generic one imposes no restriction on the predicate whatsoever, namely when occurring as a bound variable, as in (1) and in conditionals as in (2): (1) a. Sometimes one forgets that one has a nose. b. One can doubt that one has a soul. (2) a. If one lives in a big city, one lives in a city. b. If one has a nose, one can breathe. See Moltmann (2006) for discussion.

18 204 F. Moltmann Yet the two clearly disagree. 14 Also faulty agreement is possible. Thus, (42) is acceptable even if John and Mary s grounds for their generalization are quite different (lets say when John and Mary have tried out the sofa sleeping in quite different bodily positions or when Mary just found the sofa soft enough and John just long enough to sleep on): (42) John and Mary agreed that one can sleep on this sofa. As for sharing, two people, with quite different experiences as their epistemic source, may share the content of a generic-one sentence. Thus, an inference of the following sort is always valid, even if, lets say, A s discovery was made by standing at the entrance and B s discovery by seeing a photograph of the entrance: (43) A discovered that one can see the picture from the entrance. B discovered that one can see the picture from the entrance. A and B discovered the same thing (namely that one can see the picture from the entrance). Free relative clauses and conjunction further support the criterion of sharing with generic-one sentences. Thus, (44a, b) are equally possible as conclusions of (43), as is (44c), with a nominalization: (44) a. A discovered what B found out, namely that one can see the picture from the entrance. b. A and B discovered that one can see the picture from the entrance. c. A and B made the same discovery. Sharing is obligatory with generic-one sentences rather than optional. Thus (43) with the conclusion A and B discovered different things is not valid. The parallels between generic-one sentences and sentences with predicates of personal taste strongly suggest [1] that the three intuitions of relative truth are to be explained in terms of first-person-based genericity, and [2] that first-person-based genericity is also involved in the semantics of sentences with predicates of personal taste in truth-directed contexts. Let me turn to the latter first. 4.2 The semantic analysis of generic one The intuitive idea The general idea is that sentences with generic one as a whole express a generalization based on a first-person application of a predicate, that is, they express first-person-based genericity. First-person-based genericity involves the ability of 14 Note that the relative-truth intuition about generic-one sentences could not be due to the presence of the modal. There is no such intuition about (1a, b) below: (1) a. Everyone can sleep on this sofa. b. Everyone cannot sleep on this sofa. Also, relative truth intuitions arise with generic-one sentences without a modal: (2) a. One often meets celebrities in this café. b. One does not often meet celebrities in this café.

19 Relative truth and the first person 205 abstracting from the particularities of one s own person and situation, judging oneself to be normal in relevant respects, and then generalizing to anyone meeting the same conditions. This way of generalizing self-attributions of properties is a form of abstraction, requiring a distinction between relevant and irrelevant features of a given person and his situation. First-person-based genericity can also be viewed as a form of simulation in the sense of Gordon (1986, 1995a, b), more precisely as what one may call generic simulation. 15 In the case of generic simulation, the relevant intentional agent simply generalizes his own situation, abstracting from the features of his situation that are particular to himself. He does not need to project himself onto a particular other person and make adjustments to adopt the other person s point of view (as in ordinary cases of simulation). The notion of simulation also helps us understand the quasi-first-personorientation of generic one: first-person-based genericity does not require the agent to actually self-ascribe the predicate. He may just identify with someone to whom he applies the predicate. Thus, first-person-oriented pronouns involve self-reference that is detached from the relevant agent s actual person: it may involve self-ascribing a property while identifying oneself with someone else and in fact self-ascribing a property while identifying with each one of a collection of individuals. For the semantic analysis of generic one I will make use of a primitive notion of identification I, a relation between an agent and another individual with which the agent identifies or whom the agent simulates (or projects himself onto). The basic idea is that generic one does not just range over individuals, but individuals as entities the relevant agent identifies with The formal analysis Let us start with the paraphrase of (26a), repeated below as (45a) as in (45b): (45) a. One can see the picture from the entrance. b. For any one x x as someone with whom the speaker identifies can see the picture from the entrance. Generic one ranges not over individuals as such, but individuals as having a certain property, namely the property of being someone the speaker identifies with (or simulates ). There are different ways of construing such entities under a perspective. I will adopt the view that an entity x as having a property P is indeed a different entity than x: it is a qua object in the sense of Fine (1982), namely it is the object x qua being someone the agent identifies with. On Fine s characterization, qua objects are objects obtained from an individual d and a property P (the gloss ) such that the following conditions hold: (46) For a property P and an individual d, 1. d qua P exists in a world w at a time t iff P holds of d in w at t. 15 Gordon s notion of simulation differs somewhat from that of Goldman (1989, 1995), which would not be suitable for the analysis of generic one, as discussed in Moltmann (2006).

20 206 F. Moltmann 2. d qua P is identical to a qua object d qua P just in case d = d and P = P. 3. d qua P has a property Q just in case d has Q at the time it is P. The right notion of a qua object is not quite correctly captured by the third condition given by Fine s characterization: an individual x qua being someone the agent identifies with should have only those properties for whose application the identification provides an epistemic ground or is otherwise relevant, not just any properties that hold of x at the time in question. This corresponds to the actual qualocution in ordinary language: John qua being a teacher, or more naturally John as a teacher, cannot have a property like being 35 years old, but as such he may know how children behave, be entitled to a salary, or be competent: properties for which his being a teacher is in some way relevant. The as-phrases in (47a) and (47b) provide the epistemic ground for why the predicate holds of the subject: (47) a. John as a father knows how children behave. b. Jean as a true Frenchman knows about wine. According to (47a), John s being a father is the reason why John knows how children behave and according to (47b) Jean s being a true Frenchman why Jean knows about wine. In (47a, b), omitting the as-phrase would not make any difference to the truth conditions of the sentence: the as-phrase just gives a reason for the holding of the predicate. The proposition expressed by (47a) is quite simply that John knows how children behave and in (47b) that Jean knows about wine. Similarly, in generic-one sentences the gloss only serves to provide an epistemic basis for the application of the predicate; it does not affect the truth conditions of the sentence. Moreover, the gloss does not restrict the range of entities generic one ranges over. Rather the entities are restricted by both vague conditions on what is considered normal and a contextual restriction, just like the range of any other generic quantifier. The gloss will somewhat influence the domain of quantification, though: the domain will consist of entities the speaker identifies with. As a consequence it is likely to include the speaker as well as the addressee. With this modification in the definition of a qua object, the restriction to predicates expressing possible experiences or actions follows: the gloss asks for an application of the predicate on a first-person basis even when the predicate is predicated of individuals other than the speaker or relevant agent. Generic one thus introduces a complex variable of the sort qua(x, ky[i y z]). The crucial modification of the analysis of ordinary generic sentences such as (29b) consists in replacing x by the two-place functional term qua(x, ky[i y z]), where the variable z is to stand for the relevant agent. While, intuitively, the ordinary variable concerns the truth conditions of a generic-one sentence, the gloss ky[i y z] gives the mode of presentation that is to govern the applicability of predicates, providing the epistemic basis (or, as we will see, the practical purpose) for applying the predicate. The variable z will be bound by a lambda operator defining the meaning of a generic-one sentence such as one can see the picture from the entrance as a property, as in the logical form below:

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